Deepa S. Reddy Caught! The Predicaments of Anthropology in Collaboration 2009

8/13/2019 Deepa S. Reddy Caught! The Predicaments of Anthropology in Collaboration 2009

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FIELDWORKIS NOT WHATIT USED TO BE

Learning Anthropologys Methodin a Time of Transition

Edited by

James D. Faubionand George E. Marcus

Foreword by

Michael M. J. Fischer

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON


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Copyright 2009 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or partsthereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing fromthe publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House,512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2009 by Cornell University PressFirst printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2009Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fieldwork is not what it used to be : learning anthropologys method in a time of

transition / edited by James D. Faubion and George E. Marcus ; foreword by

Michael M. J. Fischer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8014-4776-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8014-7511-5 (pbk. : alk.paper)

1. AnthropologyFieldwork. 2. EthnologyFieldwork. 3. Anthropology

Methodology. I. Faubion, James D., 1957 II. Marcus, George E. III. Title.

GN34.3.F53F52 2009

301.07'23dc22

2008049124

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Contents

Foreword: Renewable Ethnography Michael M. J. Fischer vii

Introduction: Notes toward an Ethnographic Memoir

of Supervising Graduate Research through Anthropologys

Decades of Transformation George E. Marcus 1Appendix: A Note on the Literature Relating to

Fieldwork and Ethnography 32

Part 1 REFLECTIONS ON FIRST FIELDWORK AND AFTER

1. Phantom Epistemologies Kristin Peterson 37

2. Ethnographic Remnants: Range and Limits

of the Social Method Jae A. Chung 52

3. On the Ethics of Unusable Data Jennifer A. Hamilton 73

4. Caught! The Predicaments of Ethnography

in Collaboration Deepa S. Reddy 89

5. The Dracula Ballet: A Tale of Fieldwork

in Politics Nahal Naficy 113

6. The Work of Ethnographic Fieldwork Lisa Breglia 129

Part 2 ON THE ETHICS OF BEING AN ANTHROPOLOGIST (NOW)

7. The Ethics of Fieldwork as an Ethics of Connectivity,

or The Good Anthropologist (Isnt What She Used

to Be) James D. Faubion 145


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Part 3 TEACHING FIELDWORK THAT IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE

8. Figuring Out Ethnography Kim Fortun 167Questioning a Text 173

9. Collaboration, Coordination, and Composition:

Fieldwork after the Internet Christopher Kelty(with contributions from Hannah Landecker, Ebru Kayaalp,Anthony Potoczniak, Tish Stringer, Nahal Naficy, Ala Alazzeh,Lina Dib, and Michael G. Powell) 184

Bibliography 207

Contributors 221

Index

(compiled by Timothy Chryssikos) 223

vi CONTENTS


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CAUGHT!

The Predicaments of Ethnography

in Collaboration

Deepa S. Reddy

The Field in Pieces

Then lunch with a fellow and talkabout what?In the afternoon:

I lay down for a quarter of an hour, and started workbwagau

business. At about 5 stopped, was fed up. Excited, impossible to

concentrate. Ate pineapple, drank tea, wrote E.R.M., took a walk;

intensive gymnastics. Gymnastics should be a time of concentration

and solitude; something that gives me an opportunity to escape from

the [blacks] and my own agitation. Supper with a fellow who told me

stupid anecdotes, not interesting at all.

Bronislaw Malinowski,A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term(1976)

In this and other passages from Malinowskis posthumously published diary, the

lore and allure of in situfieldwork dissipate variously into a sense of meander-

ing boredom, agitation, irritation, preoccupation with other fascinations, work,

the need for escape. Such narratives about the field and fieldwork, and there

have been many such since Malinowski, render even the most mythic concep-

tualizations of ethnographic fieldwork incoherentnot without meaning, that

is, but disjointed, comprising parts that must be methodically arranged to be

made sense of. With villages and communities now either dissipated by their

own transformations within nation-states or rejected as questionable projec-

tions of wholeness by anthropologists, it seems less and less possible to speak

of the field in a single breath, as a single place to which the lone anthropologist


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90 DEEPA S. REDDY

travels to undergo his/her rites of professional passage. So I am interested here

in the field as an almost random assemblage of sites that come into coher-

ence through the processes of fieldwork itself: the field as deterritorialized and

reterritorialized, as it were, by the questions brought to bear on it in the courseof research. This process necessarily entails much movement, as much between

physical locations closer or farther apart as between ideological positionings or

frames of reference (as I call them). Tracking this movement, understanding the

relationships between sites, ones own positioning within each, and the demands

placed on the ethnographer coming-into-beingthese, I believe are the means

by which the field is made, quite alongside the objects of study that it yields then

to ethnographic attention.

To explain this further in what follows, I use the example of my most recentethnographic work on a NIH/NHGRI-sponsored community consultation

project to research Indian and Hindu perspectives on genetic variation research

in Houston (henceforth the ELSI-HapMap project, ELSI being the acronym for

Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in genetics). I reflect only in passing on first

fieldwork simply because the links between my prior work on womens activism

and identitarian politics in India and the ELSI-HapMap project are tenuous, at

best. The topics were radically different, to be sure, but more: while I chose and

crafted my dissertation project, going about it in some fairly traditional ways,ELSI-HapMap in some senses chose, identified, and pinned me. The just do

it directive I instinctively followed in first fieldwork was grossly insufficient

for the second, and was replaced by a highly organized and constantly vetted

methodnot so much because I wished it so, but because that was what being

an anthropologist at the interface with science and medicine seemed to demand.

ELSI-HapMap forced a rethinking of what ethnography entailed by having to

explain what ethnography wasntor, conversely, of having to explain its possi-

bilities at the outer edges of other disciplinary approaches. Quite possibly I could

not have done this were it not for the prior experience of first fieldwork, but ELSI-

HapMap was also a first in its way. Through it, by becoming an anthropologist

among bioethicists and geneticists and social scientists interested in the study

of science in motion, I learned of anthropology anew: of the classic model

and all it was expected to produce, and of how the authority of the discipline

as craft comes to live on (Marcus, this volume) almost in spite of the discipline

itself. ELSI-HapMap was my means of looking back on ethnographic praxis,

of finding the anchor of lore in practice while in the thick of collaborative

research with the biosciences (Marcus, this volume). In this sense, a reflection on

my second project seems far more pertinent to the themes of this essay and of

this volume than an account of the movement from first to second.


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CAUGHT! 91

My role in ELSI-HapMap was largely pre-writtenwith some flexibility and

room for innovation, but still largely given, and drawing my expertise as Indian-

ist specifically into the frame of a bioethics initiative. Not only because this is

urban anthropology par excellence and Houston is a vast, sprawling metropoliswith a large and diverse Indian community, then, but even more as a result of the

framing of this research as interdisciplinary and collaborative, the field seemed

already in pieces: a bric-a-brac assortment of people, institutions, interests, ide-

ologies, skepticisms, locations, and expertise all forced into specific modes of

contact with one another. And the field demanded piecing together via various

prescriptive collaborative means, all toward an endunderstanding Indian and

Hindu perspectives on genetic variation researchthat was at once crystal clear

and frustratingly unfathomable.The narrative below follows the evolution of this project with an eye to mark-

ing the disjointed character of the field and fieldwork that then calls for particular

kinds of professional collaboration: indeed, gives older models of community

studies a new lease on life and pressures particular kinds of classic ethno-

graphic praxis into being. Collaboration in this context is both enabling and

limiting, I suggest, but is nevertheless the overriding means by which a heavily

deterritorialized and disjointed field is paradoxically given a (rhizomic) coher-

ence of a kind, and new objects of ethnographic study acquire definition. Ethno-graphic method comes into being somewhere in the interstices of such a field

in pieces, a product of interlocking expectations generated of andby anthropol-

ogy. It is the emergence of such method alongside its ethnographic objects out of

a bric-a-brac terrain jointed by the mechanisms of collaboration that I explore.

The Inherited Field

The charge of the ELSI-HapMap study in Houston, as I have often described

it to Indians in Houston, is fairly straightforward. The NIH would like to col-

lect blood samples from 140 Indian Gujaratis to add data (and presumably

depth) to an already existing Haplotype map, which is a strategized cataloging of

human genetic variation.1The original HapMap was compiled from four sets

1. The International HapMap Project (http://www.hapmap.org) is a collaboration among sci-

entists in Japan, China, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States, formally launched in

2002. It goal is to create a haplotype map of the human genome, to describe common patterns of

human DNA sequence variation. Differences in individual bases of the DNA sequence are called

single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs or snips). Sets of nearby SNPs on the same chromosome

tend to be inherited in blocks, and their pattern on this inherited block is known as a haplotype.


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of samples collected internationally and named thus to indicate their sources:

Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigeria; Japanese in Tokyo; Han Chinese in Beijing; and

CEPH (Utah residents with ancestry in Northern and Western Europe). To these

originary four were to be added a longer list that included samples from AfricanAmericans in Oklahoma; the Luhya in Webuye, Kenya; communities of Mexican

origin in Los Angeles; Denver (Colorado) metropolitan Chinese community;

Tuscans in Sesto Fiorentino, Italy; and lastly Gujarati Indians in Houston. The

relationship between the different data-gathering phases of the HapMap project

has never been entirely clear; in fact, the project was announced to be complete

in October 2005, making the data that we were at the time yet to collect from

Indian Gujaratis a supplement, at best, to the completed HapMap. In any event,

the Houston project has benefited from being last in line by having the flexibilityto precede any request for blood samples with a full two years of ethnographic

inquirymuch longer than the time allowed any of the other constituent proj-

ects, as the urgency to collect samples had almost entirely lifted.

But what was this period of ethnographic inquiry supposed to achieve? This

being a community consultation initiative, the objectives were, all things con-

sidered, clear. We were to consult the Indian community in Houston over the

question of their participation in HapMap, tracking everything from their under-

standing of genetics to their interests in genetic and biomedical research, fromtheir decision to participate (or not) in the creation of culturally appropriate

informed consent documents, and the nature of the returns they might expect

for having contributed vials of blood. The reasons why the NIH/NHGRI would

support such extensive community consultation is of course a story in its own

right that deserves more attention than I can afford here (although I will return

to this theme a little later in the essay). Essentially, community review is a means

to better anticipate and so circumvent the sorts of controversies that have dogged

other blood sample-collection initiatives, the most notorious of which was of

course the Human Genome Diversity Project (HDGP). In some ways a direct

heir to this contentious past, the HapMap project frames itself as an ELSI initia-

tive, meant to focus first on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues raised by research

in genomics, meant not to presume the unilateral support of communities and to

Blocks may contain large numbers of SNPs, but only a few tag SNPs are sufficient to uniquely

identify haplotypes in a block. Such reasoning makes it possible to reduce the number of SNPs

needed to examine the entire genome from 10 million common SNPs to 500,000 tag SNPs. Genomescans that seek to find genes that affect diseases will therefore become both more cost-effective and

efficient. The International HapMap Project itself does not attempt to correlate genetic variants with

diseases, but to make information about variation available to other researchers who may then carry

out disease-specific research programs. All samples are stored at and distributed from the Coriell

Institute in Camden, N.J.


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CAUGHT! 93

move forward with sample collection only with some clear sense of community

consent. As such, the project has a history that is quite independent of anything

specifically Indianbut always the aura of possible controversy, the sense that

things could go terribly wrong if procedures are not followed, the right questionsnot asked. The task at hand, under the watchful eye of the Institutional Review

Boards (IRBs) involved, is nothing short of risk assessment and potentially also

that of fire-fighting.

Here enters something called Culture with a capital C: Chinese Culture,

Mexican Culture, Masaai Culture, Indian Culture, the Culture of a definite Peo-

ple. I should note that not all the HapMap community review projects included

anthropologists, and not all placed particular emphasis on the collection of

ethnographic data, but there was a definite Culture with which to contend,nonetheless. This concept was both intimately familiar and strikingly alien

to me. I knew and recognized it, of course, as the presumed object of ethno-

graphic research: variously a source of fascination, a demarcation of difference,

a cordoned-off territory, a thing to revere, contemplate, catalog, or champion.

But here also was Culture operationalized(Kelty 2004) by ELSI, rendered into a

usable something that is then amenable to deployment as a guide for procedural

ethics in genetic research. And I, it would appear, had been recruited not as inde-

pendent observer but as facilitator of the process that was to investigate cultureand render it a workhorse for bioethics, with the beneficiaries being (my) com-

munity on the one hand, and researchers on the other.

I will have more to say about my positioning between groups and their respec-

tive interests below. For now I want only to note that the ELSI-HapMap project

gave me a role in the operationalization of culture, as an interpreter-translator

of Indian ideas into usable material for ethics that could, say, filter into informed

consent documents so as to appropriately inform, or hurt no cultural senti-

ments in the research process. My assigned role was that of cultural broker in a

transactional chain that led from something called community to something

called genetics.2 Certainly, this was unlike any role I had ever been handed

before, as I was being called upon to put culture (and my cultural expertise) to

good use and, as I would quickly discover, also harness my position as an area

academic for the betterment of mycommunity. The fact that I am Indian was

not incidental to either role. Quite the contrary, it had a use-value, a (presumed)

closeness to both culture and community, with the very position of the native

2. And not just my role, to be sure: each of us involved with the ELSI-HapMap study in Houston

played broker to greater or lesser degrees. This said, my ethnic background shaped my position in

ways that set my discomforts and commitments somewhat apart from others in our group, as I am

about to suggest.


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anthropologist taken to set the objects of classic ethnography into motionthis

time not merely for the sake of ethnographic understanding, but rather in the

specific interests of ELSI.

In short, the inherited field turned me, and everyone else in our researchgroup, into cultural producers of the very kind whose work I might otherwise

have been interested in scrutinizing.3For how else might we have completed the

task of generating interest in genetic research (and our study in particular), per-

haps producing educational materials or just generally keeping the community

informed about the project? How would we, in all good conscience, staff booths

at community events and recruit volunteers for interviews and focus groups

without communicating some sense of the worthiness of our efforts? The choice

was between being invested and being disingenuous, and neither was a com-fortable position, for if one allied me wholly with ELSI research or pitted me

straightforwardly against it, the other entirely masked my professional affilia-

tion and commitments. Perhaps being overly sensitive to the comments of col-

leagues who somewhat disparagingly named HapMap the unfortunate successor

of the Human Genome Diversity Project, I was also acutely affected by the atmo-

sphere of deep skepticism that prevailed among many (although not all) scholars

engaged in the social/ethnographic study of sciencefor whom any truly ethical

position vis--vis genomics would have to be a skeptical, critical, and distanci-ated one. Chris Kelty (this volume) notes a certain anthropological predilection

for exclusivity, the avowed professional interest in remaining anthropologists

rather than joining in and becoming part of their field for the sake of maintain-

ing critical distance, which I would argue has considerable impact on shaping

the field.

Indeed, our own wariness as researchers involved (implicated?) in the ELSI-

HapMap study cannot be underestimated in this regard. Ours was a project

steeped in what Mike Fortun has called an ethics of suspicion, an anticipation

of everything going awry especially when genetics are involved (Fortun 2005).

This was a formulation we quite embraced, in NIH/NHGRI workshop presenta-

tions about what concerns and risks we didntfind among Indians in Houston,

in our own insistence that the sampling phase of the research would notproceed

without active community involvement and support, even in the assessment that

our findings (such as a healthy regard for Knowledge) were anticlimactic, as my

research assistant Corrie Manigold once described them. From this perspective,

there were significant risks involved in taking on more-or-less close, rather than

3. Indeed, we were each interviewed by Jenny Reardon for her own NSF-sponsored research, enti-

tled Paradoxes of Participation: The Status of Groups in Liberal Democracies in an Age of Genom-

ics, in June 2006.


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CAUGHT! 95

obviously distanciated, roles within the ELSI-HapMap project. The field that

unfolded was thus a polarized one overdetermined by critique in which ELSI

research was exactly as James Watson imagined: a move to preempt the critics

(cited in Fortun 2005, 162).So there are two meanings of the word caught as the title of this essay that

are both relevant to understanding the field and its formation: the sense of being

embedded in a nexus of relationships that each makes its own demands, but also

found out,caught red-handed with hands in cookie jars as it were, taking the

multiple demands seriously, allowing ethnography to become a tool in the hands

of other interests that are properly the objects of critique, and then needing to

explain the undoing and redoing of ethnographys and ones own complicities

within these schemes. The point is not so much that ethnography can be profes-sionally risky business, but that the terrains in which it is produced and in which

it acquires meaning are many and can hardly be avoided, and that an accounting

of the demands of each of these is what pressures research into existence. The

inherited field positioned me, with not much apparent wiggle room, on the one

hand in a research community comprised of bioethicists, physical anthropolo-

gists, population geneticists, legal historians, and sociologists and, on the other,

amid a community comprised of various and sundry religio-cultural orga-

nizations, and of course the people running these organizations from diversepersonal and professional backgrounds. Because I found myself the point of

articulation between these two loosely defined groups, much more so than my

colleagues for being both Indian and Indianist, the sense of divergent commit-

ments to divergent sets of interests (on both sides) made the work consuming,

both personally and professionally. I longed frequently for Malinowskis pine-

apple, tea, gymnastics, and other comparable modes of escape.

Collaboration as Method

This distinct sense of discomfort generated by a particular kind of positioning

within the field alerted me to what I have come to see as a characteristic of the field

itself: its disjointed nature, its sometimes overwhelming sense of being a collection

of segmentsplaces and positions and commitmentsdisconnected and there-

fore in need of ethnographic grounding. I had encountered such a field before in

my dissertation research, in tracing expressions of Hindu political identity from

middle-class Hindu homes to political party offices and media debates, ethnicist

rhetoric becoming a resource for new critique and refashioned feminist identity in

the spaces of womens groups and broadly Left politics in India. No position, in no

place, was entirely comfortable for me as (Indian, Hindu, middle-class, upper-caste,


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even NRI or non-resident Indian) anthropologist; being in any one involved a level

of complicity, with all the ethical heaviness that complicity inherently implies.4

Within the frame of my first fieldwork, I sought to link a series of sites that were

engaged in rather heated debate with one another, in states of mutually reinforc-ing outrage, as it werebut that linking was an after-the-fact means to make an

argument and thus to render the field analytically intelligible (cf. Hamilton, this

volume; Reddy 2006). In other words, it was not a precondition of fieldwork itself,

and it made my apprentice fieldwork extraordinarily burdensome, pressing me to

become a veritable contrarian, as Jim Faubion once remarked. The field in pieces

was an exacting place to be, as each site demanded allegiance, to greater or lesser

extents, and tolerated deviations only marginally. Within this there were models

of collaboration, to be sure: the Womens Studies Research Center Anveshis LawCommittee, which brought together scholars and lawyers with a shared interest

in indigeneity and human rights, and the Womens Resource Center Asmitas cre-

ation of spaces in which women with different needs and different interests could

meet and work and interact, to offer just two examples. But there were as many

other possibilities of collaboration that were foreclosed, thanks to impenetrable

histories of difficult personal relations and differences in political approaches, so

much so that any account of womens activism in the city, including my own, was

subject to more or less stringent critique. Negotiating different sets of expecta-tions, demands, and politico-scholarly positionings was not merely impossible in

first fieldwork, it was professionally risky business: I doubt very much that I could

go back now to Hyderabad, should I want to, to pick up all the threads of my dis-

sertation project with equal ease.

In the ELSI-HapMap work, too, there is a series of very distinct sites that come

into dialogue with one another. By this time in the history of genetic research,

however, heated criticisms of sample-collection had given way to a set of proce-

dures that replace the charges and dilemmas of complicity with a methodology

called collaboration that shapes fieldwork. Let me clarify. Collaboration here

is not so much the possibility of working jointly with informants and interlocu-

tors (cf. Lassiter 2005a, 2005b), although that is never precluded, but is at once a

recognition of disciplinary distinctiveness, specializations and expert cultures, a

form of professionalism and a method by which to tackle matters that straddle

the boundaries of science, ethics, culture, legality, religion, and more. Collab-

oration does not appear in our grant application as an explicitly rationalized

research strategy, nor is it a recognized method of ethnographic research. By

4. The ethnographic literature on such uncomfortable alliances suggests that such experiences are

not exceptional. See, for instance, the essays in the 1998 (7:2) issue of Science as Culture,guest edited

by Kim Fortun and Todd Cherkasky.


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the time of our research, however, it is a presumed strategy of turning disciplin-

ary pluralism into a strategic resource (Fortun and Cherkasky 1998, 146): of

hitching different forms of expertise to a single carriage and therefore training

each, in more or less significant ways, to make sure the carriage does ultimatelyget pulled. Differences matter here, far more than commonalities, although they

must somehow be aligned to become meaningful means to larger, predeter-

mined ends. The identity of fieldworker as contrarian, which had been so useful

in situating myself in the fraught fields of Indian feminist activism and religious

politics, was unnecessary here, even counterproductive. What mattered far more

now was disciplinary particularity, the recognized value of disciplinary differ-

ence.

The unease of recognizing, valuing, and committing to labor across disciplin-ary difference (all of which Fortun and Cherkasky see as inherent to collabora-

tion) has at least one important methodological outcome that I want to highlight

here. I have occasionally been struck at the relief with which anthropologists

sometimes approach one another at consortium gatherings or other interdis-

ciplinary meetings as though discovering long-lost comrades in the embattled

fields of expertise, the given designation Anthropologist apparently obviating

all intradisciplinary differences in approach and training. By identifying Anthro-

pology as the key to Culture, and thus as thediscipline to bridge the socialand the biological sciences via the conduits of ethics (cf. Marcus 2002a), col-

laborations between the biological and human sciences also generate Anthro-

pology to the extent that they generate certain specific expectations of what

Anthropologists exclusively do.For one thing, as I have said above, Anthropol-

ogy is charged with operationalizing knowledge about Culture. But how is it

that Anthropologists are to gather their data so as to preserve the uniqueness

of their contributions? Not so much through interviews, which are common to

other disciplines, not so much through other forms of face-to-face contact with

people, but primarily through something called participant observation. The

method seems to require both much justification and no explanation at all: How

quantifiable data will be extracted from hanging out and naturalistic observa-

tion, how bullet-point ends will be met by such meandering means certainly

bears spelling out. The method itself, however, as somehow self-evidently a

form of cultural immersion seems to require little further rationalization. In

this, participant observation becomes virtually synonymous with fieldwork

in Anthropology, a pithy, catch-all phrase to capture the uniqueness of ethno-

graphic method and, indeed, of Anthropology itself. It also becomes (oddly) a

sort of disciplinary defense, a sign of the value and the esoteric impermeability of

the discipline that protects the Anthropologists place at the collaborative, not to

mention financially lucrative, tables of ELSI research. It becomes the reason for


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the collaboration and simultaneously the means by which ethnography produces

value for ethics in science. If collaboration as methodology generates some of the

connective tissue between the diverse disciplines brought into dialogue through

ELSI research, then, it does so also by generating select tropes that come to standin for what ethnography concretely is.

Here I should add that few other community consultation projects made such

room for participant observation in their research protocols. Indeed, other

anthropologists I met at NIH/NHGRI-sponsored workshops on community

consultation remarked that we were lucky to have had even such support for

ethnographic method in our collaborative exercise. In most other projects, focus

groups and interviews represented primary modes of data collection. Qualita-

tive research, broadly conceived, stood in for ethnographic fieldwork, involvingethnographers simply as skilled practitioners of qualitative research techniques.

Even focus groupsa methodology employed in market research far more than

in classic ethnographybecome ethnographic by association with the qualita-

tive. Anthropology and its practitioners are yet again transformed in accordance

with the needs of ELSI research.

The object of research, it bears restating, is given and clearly so: understand

community perspectives on genetics (for the sake of capturing risks and needs),

develop culturally appropriate recruitment strategies, develop culturallyappropriate consent documents, andalmost as an afterthought, although a

hugely crucial onecollect 140 blood samples from Indian Gujaratis. With an

apparently definite Indian and Hindu Culture in play, the outcomes of this

research for the NIH/NHGRI are anything but elusive. Anthropology in this con-

text is an instrument, a stepping-stone, the means by which to mobilize Culture

for the sake of (bio)ethics and then in the interests of Science. And, precisely as a

means to some other nonanthropological end, the means of ethnography, which

are its in situmethods with their qualitative emphasis, are far more important

than its modes of, say, analysis, which also could be said to give the discipline its

unique stamp. The collective labor of collaboration at this stage of research is not

primarily to establish the NIH/NHGRIs goals, which other collaborations (such

as that of the HapMap Consortium) have already established. The collective labor

of collaboration at this stage is primarily to establish the means by which these

goals are best achieved, and to implement these, with sometimes less, sometimes

more emphasis on ethnography itself. Anthropology is reduced, as a result, to its

classic fascination with Culture as object, and to its classic method in the form

of participant observation, its qualitative emphasis. In short, Anthropology is

expected (largely) to perform either a prior or distilled version of itself.

It is not a coincidence that such oddly classic formations as Culture and

participant observation become the emblematic of a fetishized ethnography


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precisely as culture (as object of study) and field methods have been filtering

through successive decades of disciplinary transformations. Nor is it a coinci-

dence, I think, that Culture, as a definite association with a people, comes to

be methodologically mobilized within the HapMap project alongside the cat-egory populations, which the International HapMap Consortium recognizes

as scientifically valuable but culturally quite imprecise (2004, 469, Box 2). This

is not to critique HapMap as much as it is to recognize that outmoded ideas of

ethnography, the way we dontdo things any more, exist as a normative, even

prescriptive, means to rein in other objects (like genetics) that are obviously and

simultaneously in motion. Collaboration as the modus operandi of research

done in such a framework necessarily generates stultified expectations of eth-

nographic praxis and makes Anthropology instrumental to the large promisesof world health (International HapMap Consortium 2004, 474) while simul-

taneously yielding itself to new ethnographic inquiry. Collaboration, too, like

culture, is itself everywhere these days, itself a bit too feel-good, too friendly a

notion for the commitments, fights, and compromises that anthropologists fre-

quently make in order to pursue some kind of conceptual innovation, too weak a

word to describe the entanglements that are by now thoroughly commonplace in

cultural anthropology: entanglements of complicity, responsibility, mutual ori-

entation, suspicion and paranoia, commitment and intimate involvement, creditand authority, and the production of reliable knowledge for partially articulated

goals set by organizations, institutions, universities, corporations, and govern-

ments (Kelty, this volume).

And yet it is precisely the friendly feel-good quality of the term that renders

collaboration a stable methodological tool to break up a problem into identifi-

able, exclusive chunks that could, but dont necessarily, pave the way for con-

ceptual and theoretical work (Kelty, this volume). Whether any conceptual and

theoretical work in fact ensues, or whether collaboration is limited to what Kelty

identifies as simply coordination is of course a separate question. One way or

other, collaboration becomes the neatly coordinated way in which we donow

do things; the messy and multiple entanglements of collaboration are fresh

material for fresh ethnographic reflection, beyond the strict purview of collab-

orative method itself. The conceptual and methodological tools may be worn,

outmoded, or weak for ethnographic purposes, in other words, but their utility

is not lost in cross-disciplinary exercises like ELSI-HapMap, which serve then to

bring new ethnographic objects into view. The operationalization of ethnogra-

phy points, fairly ironically, into new ethnographic terrain.

But what exactly is my work beyond the operationalization of ethnographic

knowledge? What does it mean to make HapMap an object of study, encrusted

and contained as it is by worn-out notions of ethnography? The grant applications


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100 DEEPA S. REDDY

I wrote as a doctoral student seeking funding for dissertation research compelled

me to articulate responses to such questions at the outset. All the pages sub-

mitted for NIH review, by contrast, defined NIH goals and made those mine

for three years, but configuring any ethnographic goals beyond was a separatetask. As clear as my objectives were, as clearly defined as my methods, my own

tasks were ill defined. Recognizing this fact in advance, the associate dean at my

university asked me once if the HapMap research was really to be considered

research for my own purposes; would it yield publications? I rationalized that

it was all about positioning, buying myself access to a field that would invariably

yield at least some research products. But, again, what was this field? And what

did I plan to study in it?

Before I address these questions, however, I need first to tackle my given objectof study, the community, and a second mode of collaboration that also brings

the disjointed field and its objects into better view.

Community Consultation as Collaboration

As with culture, here again in community was a concept both intimately

familiar and overwhelmingly alien: on the one hand, an object with presumedcoherence, a focus of ethnographic expertise and, on the other, a group as dif-

fuse and disparate as the city of Houston itself, a beguiling linguistic fiction

with vague and elusive referents (Comaroff 2005, 127). Our relationship as a

group of researchers to this community was given in the form of a methodol-

ogy known as community consultation. The community was to be engaged or

consulted over issues related to genetics in order to discern risks, possible harms,

and expectations of returns in advance of sample-collection. We were to investi-

gate the following: (1) so as to establish a Community Advisory Group or some

equivalent body to serve as liaison between the community and scientific bodies:

Who speaks for the Indian community? Where are the sites of authority, how are

authority and voice ordered? And (2) so as to assess interest and risk and man-

age both: What were the expectations of researchers and the entire process of

sample-collection? Community, presumably already intelligible in all its depth

to anthropologists, especially native ones, was now to be made navigable for the

sake of Ethics of ELSI.

Community consultation, to offer only a cursory summary here, gains

force and spurs further debate as a consequence of pressing demands for group /

collective recognition, sovereignty, and identity, which transform the context

and substance of population genetics research and in this way help define what

the principled conduct of research might mean in practice (Brodwin 2005, 148).


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CAUGHT! 101

Community review has really only one foundational premise: that communities

have a crucial stake in their futures and in their representations and therefore

need to be at least aware of and ideally involved in research that involves them.

This definitive premise emerges largely as a result of prior encounters betweenresearchers and community, but is consolidated in the furor over the Human

Genome Diversity Project, an international initiative to collect blood samples

from select indigenous communities to anchor understandings of human evolu-

tion. Groups targeted for sampling sharply criticized the project for its biopiracy

and biocolonialism, further demanding a role in defining research agendas, inter-

preting the facts, and acquiring the right to the (monetary) benefits of research

itself. The overwhelming response to the HGDP as a globalized iteration of the

politics of recognition rendered Human Population Genetics forever politicallyvulnerable, as Paul Brodwin has remarked (2005, 148, 169), from that point

on. The premise of community review, I wish to highlight here, is a particular

response to this deepening sense of political vulnerability.

Community reviewin other words, a prior notion of communityand the

premise for review comes into our ELSI project in Houston, then, as a pre-

packaged preemptive move in anticipation of political assault. In this, it defines

the nature of my contact with Indians in Houston and guides the sorts of ques-

tions to be addressed with them. Its mode is wholly representational, which is tosay that participants must on some level identify with the principle of represen-

tation: the fact that some groups/cultures and some (genetic) populations and

some views are underrepresented, and that efforts such as ours are meant to

address these historic imbalances. So also does community review very nearly

expect the communities in question to see themselves as politically vulnerable.5

Ethics then can help negotiate the vulnerability of researchers, on the one hand,

and the vulnerability of communities, on the other, by bringing these into dia-

logue: you tell me where your rights begin, so that I can determine where my

nose ends, to reverse the popular dictum.

Not only is this model of ethics culturally and historically specific, it is also

procedurally overdetermined. Virtually all our decisions as researchers were sub-

ject to IRB scrutiny. Confidentiality and consent needed to be explained over

and over. Paperwork needed signing. Documentation of all sorts, from meet-

ing minutes to mileage to assiduous quantification of participant observation,

needed generating. Decisions about from whom to collect samples needed to be

madeIndians resident in Houston, who had had opportunities to participate

in the consultation, or Indians visiting Houston for regional Gujarati congresses

5. But not too vulnerable: Native Americans were deliberately not selected for sampling because

of their overwhelmingly critical response to the HGDP (International HapMap Consortium 2004).


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102 DEEPA S. REDDY

with no prior knowledge of the community engagement phase of our work? Did

the distinction matter? The infrastructures of ethics, precipitated in community

review which was itself premised on a sense of political vulnerability, were the

obvious and not-so-obvious guides to just about everything we could do.The individuals with whom I met and interacted generally understood little

of this background. Only those who had themselves been professionally involved

in addressing health or other disparities among Houstons diverse racial/ethnic

groups identified readily with the premises of our work. Most others variously

ignored the consent documents, dismissed them as legal mumbo-jumbo, or

saw them simply as the constraints under which we (researchers) had to oper-

ate. The questions we were asking seemed valuable, but rather irrelevant to the

communitya fact which was borne out by the reluctance of some institutionsto lend our efforts time and support: its not that genetics isnt important, I was

sometimes told or shown in so many polite ways, its just that we are not doc-

tors. Our priorities are different6(cf. Reddy n.d.).

On the other hand, there was also a model of collaboration actively advanced

by many with whom I spoke. Less theorized than community consultation, to

be sure, there was nonetheless a discrete set of expectations that derived from a

recognition of my position within the ELSI-HapMap group and that were there-

fore brought to bear on me and my work: sing at the temple, help organize thehealth fair, help organize community events, attend said events (held with relent-

less regularity in Houston), lend support to various and sundry cultural initia-

tives, become a torchbearer for the establishment of an India Studies program

at the University of Houston (I was sent a poster mock-up that named me as one

such), and more along similar lines. This was not collaboration as professional-

ism or interdisciplinary harnessing of differences, but collaboration as volun-

teerism, personal favor and personal commitment to something still abstractly

assembled as the community. Here, however, the concept was less anthropo-

logically inflected, a much more straightforward reference to Indians as a dia-

sporic group within the United States. And the pressing need for this community

in diaspora was not so much representation, especially at a moment when Indian

institutions, organizations, and activities are all but commonplace; Indians have

6. Of course the comment that we are not doctors assumes that only physicians would be inter-

ested in the outcomes of genetic research, an interesting perspective in its own right that is, oddly

enough, well in line with the emphasis of the International HapMap Project on health-related out-comes. And the comment ignores the number of Indians who are themselves physicians in Houston

alone, not to mention the clout of the AAPI (American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin)

nationally. The simplest reading is that the comment is intended to limit further conversation, but it

also points to the disjuncture between community and genetic research as entities that come to

be allied only within the context of community engagement studies.


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CAUGHT! 103

run for political office (in Sugarland, Texas, and elsewhere), and most measures

of advancement indicate superlative progress. Certainly, there was almost none

of the political, or for that matter cultural, vulnerability on which community

review so centrally depends for its rationale. Rather, the pressing needthe vul-nerability that impels action, as it werewas much more for links to be main-

tained with Indian cultural traditions, all the more as newer generations are born

and grow up outside India, and for Indian culture (that construct again) to be

somehow merged with mainstream American life.7Indeed, my own participa-

tion in the HapMap study gained meaning and value precisely because it fitted

this mold: something done for the betterment and development of the commu-

nity. And because I was already so positioned, it followed logically that I should

then contribute ever more for the sake of that abstract goal.The expectation of service (for the community), I have argued elsewhere, itself

rationalized community participation in our study, whether in its ethnographic

or sample-collection phases. Giving time or blood was tantamount to serving

some greater community good, in other words (cf. Reddy 2007). The fact that

this expectation extended to me was logical, of course, and its pressing nature

made me acutely aware of the distinctions between the two models of collabora-

tion in operation here: one a paid mandate (which would after three years be

neither paid nor a mandate), the other wholly voluntary, based on ethical com-mitments to communal ideals; one rooted in a history of research violations and

controversies, the other moved by the imperatives of diaspora; one invested in

the reformulated and procedural Ethics of ELSI, the other invested in ethics

quite incognizant of ELSI.

Both sets of collaborations were deeply invested in such concepts as culture

and community, but for purposes that were quite at odds with one another.

Not only was I made aware of the two divergent models of collaboration, I was

also pressed closely between them: asked to give of my time and my energies

beyond the demands of professional and paid obligation, and asked for a com-

mitment to things Indian in a way that the ELSI project was just not framed to

7. So in recent years cultural performances of music and dance put on by students and local artists

have become regular offerings at the Miller Outdoor Theater in Hermann Park, a statue of Gandhi

now towers over an odd assortment of busts of Latin American figureheads at the Rose Garden, and

the local Kannada organization organizes yearly seminars in collaboration with the Museum of Fine

Arts Houston, inviting the participation of scholars from Europe, India, and all around the United

States. The initiative to establish an India Studies program and/or Chair at the University of Hous-ton is also in the same vein. Finally, we received much praise from community representatives for

organizing a Grand Rounds Lecture at Baylor College of Medicine and the Methodist Hospital, on

Gandhian ethics of nonviolence and medical practice. The wish clearly was that discussions bringing

Indian ideas into other, non-Indian contexts and encouraging the interaction of community with

academia would continue.


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104 DEEPA S. REDDY

incorporate. My communitymine because I did identify with it and because it

claimed me, in turndisregarded entirely the thirty percent quantification of

my annual participation on our grant. Instead, I was reminded that most people

who really contributed to community development did so after they were doneworking ten-hour days. And, having been hired on the ELSI-HapMap project as

an Indianist, precisely for my close ties to the Indian community, and being the

only Indian in our research group, suffice it to say that I felt obligated to build

and maintain the very ties that I was presumed to have. I felt crushed between

two sets of expectations, two registers that each claimed culture and community

in divergent ways, and above all by the demand that anthropology as discipline

would have the ready-made means to link these meaningfully.

What did it mean to return the benefits of genetic research to the Indian com-munity in Houston? For us, as researchers, the moral imperative to give back

flowed logically from our own responses to the fallout of the HGDP and from

such wider movements as resulted in the Declaration of Belm, which effectively

instituted the principle of redistributive justice as central to any kind of ethical

prospecting research.8So it was obvious that something needed to be returned for

the favors of time and blood, but what? We were not collecting samples for com-

mercial use, so there was no question of royalties flowing back, even if geneticists

down the line might have generated royalties. In any event, Indians are not inneed of community development projects or communal toilets or schools, but

instead frame their priorities in terms of needing to foster ties to Indian culture

and to bring this into the American mainstream. What was needed was not the

return of monetary benefits, but the return of work, effort, time, and above all

identification with the communitys notions of culture: presentations on genet-

ics at the Meenakshi temple, presentations articulating Gandhian principles with

medical practice. As an anthropologist and as an Indian, I saw it as necessary not

merely to document, but also to incorporate, these priorities and the conceptions

informing them into our research. As an Indianist with my own proclivities, I

found it difficult to live up to such expectations, especially when they demanded

an overwhelming focus on Gandhi (at a time when stringent critiques from some

quarters have perhaps bolstered allegiance to Gandhian precepts in others). As

a paid researcher with the ELSI-HapMap group, I recognized the impossibility

of asking colleagues for participation beyond the time-allotments given in our

research protocol, or beyond the mandated three years of our grants term. The

8. And not just to prospecting-based research, either: witness the ways in which companies as

ubiquitous as Target and Starbucks also make the idea of giving back central to their ethical

business practices.


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CAUGHT! 105

expectations of community far exceeded the capacities and parameters delimited

by our study.

The Double Bind of Genres

The deterritorialized field unraveled, then, into a series of expectations mani-

fested in distinct sites: multiple commitments to multiple publics, each quite

important, each quite inescapable. The parameters generated by the ELSI-

HapMap project were those of a classic double bindin which my commitments

as an ethnographer to the community I was studying were implicated as much as

my commitments as an Indian to the community to which I belonged. Even so,the means by which to navigate the double bind were not straightforwardly to be

found in the company of Anthropologists. Why?

Here, again, were two additional sets of expectations to consider. The notion

that science is political has become virtually axiomatic in social science dis-

course, an all but predictable conclusion that seems nonetheless to foster the

ethics of oppositional critique of which Mike Fortun has written (2005, 161).

The prevailing ethos of critique within the discipline had a profound bearing on

the directions of my work, as I was soon to discover. The orientation of HapMapbeing in some ways undeniably political, given its heritage in controversies like

the HGDP, how could I ignore this or even set it aside, no matter how apolitical

the Indian communitys own positions on the issues of ethics in genetics were?

What was the nature of the choice I was making, and what was its rationale?

Such were the questions posed (not unkindly) to me at a panel presentation

made at the Society for Cultural Anthropology meetings, for my paper had been

written in the voice of an Indianist. This was one additional set of expectations

brought to bear on my work by an audience of none other than Anthropologists.

Here was, among other things, an atmosphere of deep skepticism about science

and genomics, and there was no circumventing it; it was the given framework of

everything, it seemed.

By contrast, I wished for a useful means by which to take stock, say, of the res-

sentiment that not only marks much of science studies writing (Fortun 2005,

164), but also characterizes the responses of at least some geneticists to analyses

generated via an increasingly privileged ELSI research. If critique was the over-

riding framework guiding analysis, then there seemed the need to admit its mul-

tiple manifestations. Was there a way to reasonably account for the frustrations

of geneticists over, for instance, the centrality accorded race in science studies

writing? How could one avoid presuming, implicitly or otherwise, that if the

scientists designing genetics research were only more humanistic, more ethical,


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106 DEEPA S. REDDY

more responsible, or had better values to begin with, we wouldnt be faced with

the implications that justly preoccupy our attention (Fortun 2005, 164)? What

did it methodologically and conceptually mean to demand that geneticists be

more humanistic, more ethical, and more responsible? Not unrelated were thewell-meaning, anti-racist motivations of HapMap organizers and other sci-

entists as phenomena with which to reckon, as Jenny Reardon has done in her

writing on the HGDP (2004), but not merely as oddities or apparent contradic-

tions. And, finally, I wished for a way to incorporate the so-called emic and the

seemingly anticlimactic Indian apolitical affirmation of the inherent value of

science into an analysis of ELSI-HapMap itself. Not taking such views into

account would have been tantamount to suggesting, on the advice of fellow

Anthropologists, that the very ethnographic perspectives I had documentedwere nave and ill informed for their apolitical orientation, at worst, or that

they belonged in a separate cultural register, notamenable to integration with

mainstream thought, at best. The choices delineated by the prevailing modes

of critique within the discipline seemed untenable even as they defined the very

framework of any possible research based on ELSI-HapMap.

As the lesser of two evils, I gravitated somewhat defensively toward retaining

my commitments to community, to India studies, and to my ascribed identity

as Indianist. But the problem of segregation dogged me still. With the fields ofscience and technology studies and the social studies of science now well insti-

tuted as areas in their own rights, where did the older area studies models

fit in such reformulated intellectual terrain? The Indian and Hindu perspec-

tives that the ELSI-HapMap research sought would no doubt have made for an

interesting addition to the annals of bioethics, but only as a segregated chapter

with not much more value added than that. Retaining too closely the identity

of an Indianist in the company of scholars of science seemed to run a similar

risk: here, too, my work might be of interest to Indians and other Indianists, but

beyond those audiences, it would be largely an interesting chapter on Culture

added to the annals of science studies, another model of giving to add to the

existing mixes. So the challenge in this struggle over genre, it seemed to me, was

not merely that of navigating the binds precipitated by ELSI-HapMap, but that

of learning to speak to the different audiences within the discipline of anthro-

pology itself, as also to the distinct professional and intellectual compulsions

these groups represented. Subject and object (or area) demanded integration,

all the more since ELSI-HapMap tied both together within the framework of its

expectations.

Arthur Kleinman makes a distinction between moral processes and ethical

discourse, where the moral is a dimension of practical, localized engagements

with specific social worlds and the ethical is abstract, principle-based, a debate


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CAUGHT! 107

over codified values, the space of (bio)ethics itself (Kleinman 1998, 363 65).

For the moral community represented by Indians in Houston, blood is largely

and unproblematically a possession but a wholly alienable one, to be freely given

for an easily identifiable greater good represented by genetic research. For acommunity of scientists, particularly bioethicists and those others allied with

bioethics initiatives (including anthropologists), blood is an abstract but ethi-

cal problem, one which marks out a terrain fraught with anxiety, the perpetual

threat of controversy, and all the attendant legal/institutional protections and

precautions. Kleinman sets out then to develop the case for experience, arguing

that the concern with ethical discourse far predominates over an orientation to

moral experience and that his own professional positioning prepares him for

such an approach (Kleinman 1998, 373).What I have tried to demonstrate in this narrative, however, is that it was

harder by far in the context of the ELSI-HapMap research to make the same

choice. It is a significant comment on the current predicament of anthropol-

ogy as a discipline that we find ourselves allied with both sides on questions like

that of blood sampling: as ethnographers who discern the contours of practical,

localized engagements with specific social worlds, and as ethnographers working

within the scaffoldings of established bioethics projects (such as the HapMap),

who track abstract debates on codified values lifted from some local contexts andbrought to bear on others.

Even further, I mean to suggest that we find ourselves caught in between the

subject and area pulls of the discipline particularly when called to be Anthro-

pologists in the prescriptive ways we dont do it any more. Area specialty, of

course, often remains crucial to ethnography for professional identification and

on the job market besides. But despite that, it also runs the risk of becoming a

niche identification in an age where any exclusively area approach to ethnogra-

phy is not only dated, but is also diffused by the predominance of the more topi-

cally driven, interdisciplinary approaches in cultural studies, science studies, and

the like. The case for moral experience that Kleinman builds, which is centrally

the case for immersed local, cultural engagements, is therefore both valued and

marginalized within the discipline ironically in much the same way that Indian

and Hindu perspectives are valued and marginalized in wider conversations

about bioethics in genetic research. Shifting from one collaborative context to

the next, ethnography has perforce to deal alternatingly with the shifting values

of its objects of study.

The double bind of genres, the sense of being caught in between multiple

and divergent sets of expectations precipitated both by specific projects and the

social science study itself, seems increasingly emblematic of the character of

fieldwork, and seems increasingly to define the parameters for any analysis that


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108 DEEPA S. REDDY

can then logically follow. Something called ethnography is perpetually undone

and redone, and as a result, fetishized, protected, or freely reinvented. Ethno-

graphic value is thus forever in the process of being translated, reconstituted,

recirculated; ethnography is made up as one moves through collaborations andthe various sites that give it meaning. Not only does the ethnographer become a

cultural producer in his/her own right, but ethnography, too, becomes both by-

product and end-product of such endeavor.

Between Thick and Thin

The by-products of the ELSI-HapMap work (the press releases, the statisticaldata, the synopses of community perspectives) are of course end-products

in their own right and of a different order than the anthropologically desired

ends of such research in which I amwe are allobservers and the things

being observed: participant observation with a vengeance, I dare say. The ELSI-

HapMap project, it should be said, too, internally tolerates little methodological

bricolage. This is an NIH-funded initiative that allows latitude but demands

rigor of the kind that quite plainly produces data that is of PowerPoint clarity,

intelligible to diverse audiences of medical practitioners and researchers. As richas the ethnographic data generated are, as useful as the analysis is, these do not

obviously speak to audiences other than social scientists. The richness of the

data works somewhat against the stated goals of the project, ironically enough.

Snowballing subject recruitment techniques, or even the multi-sited method

that follows a thing, a metaphor, a plot/story/allegory, a conflict (Marcus 1995)

may be increasingly commonplace or quite unquestioned in the course of eth-

nographic field research. Such methodological strategies are, however, red flags

for other audiences with more positivist leanings, to whom anthropologists

also must speak with greater than anthropological authority. Failure to do so

is not just the failure of research-mandated collaboration, but forecloses any

hope of releasing anthropology from its given, prescriptive forms and making

it more broadly relatable to medical/basic science research. So, within the proj-

ect, method is consistently vetted, means to particular ends specifically chosen

and justified to IRBs, funders, physical anthropologists, medical anthropolo-

gists, and ourselves alike. Method simply cannot be made out of a rhetoric of

circumstance (Marcus 2002b, 198)not because ethnographers have such

expanded freedoms to experiment but as a result of specifically devolved condi-

tions of constraint.

Method is another story entirely, however, beyond the deadlines, mandates,

and regulations of the ELSI-HapMap project. Here is ostensibly free terrain


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CAUGHT! 109

where predetermined methodologies are both scarce and sparse, not least

because it is difficult to devise both questions and method to encase a project

that already possesses both questions and method and in whose execution one

is primarily (and currently) involved. In classic ethnography, George Marcushas written:

thickness was a virtue, thinness was not; in multi-sited fieldwork, both

thickness and thinness are variably expected, and accounting for the dif-

ferences in quality and intensity of fieldwork material becomes one of

the key and insight-producing functions of ethnographic analysis. This

accounting for the variability of thickness and thinness of ethnography

is the most substantive and important form of reflexivity in multi-sited

projects. (2002b, 196)

Not just to account for variability, I venture to add, but (reflexive) mechanisms

to track thick and thin, to track the transformations of thick into thin, are equally

key to stitching together a field inherited in disciplinary pieces. Movement into,

out of, and in between collaborations in multi-sited research is such that meaning

is neither uniform nor stable. Culture described thickly as a stratified hierar-

chy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake winks, paro-

dies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted (Geertz1973a, 7) must be filtered, distilled, and reduced for HapMap into a thinner-

by-far version of itself. And yet, HapMap is thick with its own negotiation of

science and ethics that begs documentation tailored to particular outcomes:

defining new approaches to population genetics, or new ethnographic objects.

Sites are not either thick or thin, but produce meaning and demand coherence

by configuring thick and thin to meet given ends.

Really, I am searching out a praxis that takes stock of the fact that field sites

(and the ethnographers who encounter them) exist simultaneously in multiple

forms: even as the field unravels into a series of nodes and pathways and sign-

posts pointing both ways at once, it retains the coherence of collapsed bits and

piecesthat often seem anything but logically whole to the interlocutors within.

Sarah Strauss, reflecting on her work on yoga as transnational phenomenon,

observes that she certainly could have written a traditional ethnography, but

in so doing would also have failed completely to represent the Rishikesh which I

experienced, knowable only within the context of movement and change (1999,

189). Shes right, of course, but one wonders if her comment would apply just as

well for those who are ashramites or sadhaks,and come to Rishikesh for other

kinds of study, in search of a place that coheres and endures and whose enduring

coherence is precisely tutelary. In my own work on caste, too, Ive grappled with

the fact that while ethnographic theory now can slash essentialisms with ease,


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110 DEEPA S. REDDY

these very discounted formulations of stabilized identity continue to be power-

fully central to Dalit political discourse (Reddy 2005). The variation of thick and

thin seems roughly coeval with such variations in the demand for coherence and

meaning that remains stable, at least until the next movement into new disciplin-ary or conceptual space.

But isnt this just the distinction between the etic and emic of classic anthro-

pological theory? someone asked at my presentation at the Society for Cultural

Anthropology meetings in 2006 (which my colleague on ELSI-HapMap Jennifer

Hamilton, also a contributor to this volume, and I collaborated to co-organize)

in which I analyzed data as Indianist but in that analysis left out any mention of

the outer encasings of HapMap. I take the question as a prompt not so much to

choose between etic and emic, or between traditional ethnography and eth-nography knowable only within the context of movement and change, but to

bring these differentiated frames into conversation (as I have tried to do in an

essay on blood, based on our engagement with HapMap: see Reddy 2007). It is an

awkward task, at best: How does one neatly draw together an apparently straight-

forward commitment to science and the value of knowledge with, for instance,

the (rather too damningly) critical suggestion that Indians were selected as a

HapMap population precisely because they were not likely to oppose its ends

to produce what Jennifer Hamilton once called a HapMap of the ethically com-pliant (personal communication)? How would I, as link between community of

researchers and community of Indians, convey this unsettling possibility to my

interlocutors or otherwise take it into account?

Such questions notwithstanding, what method emerges from the overlap-

ping contexts of collaboration must necessarily undertake the awkward task of

stitching together the differentiated and opposed terrains of collaborationor

the terrains opposed (paradoxically) only in the context of collaboration. What

are the sites that demand coherence? What sort of coherence is it and how is

it enacted, produced, perceived, and interpreted? How do subject and object,

topic and area interact and what does their interaction yield to analysis?

The point is not just that a new ethnographic object comes into view and

that that object is HapMap itself. The point is also that the diverse array of col-

laborations on which HapMap (and a good number of science studies projects

like it) is built yields an equally diverse array of expectations and commitments,

professional, personal, and variously political in nature. Each of these needs to be

negotiated; each of these demarcates a set of parameters that constrain, but also

crucially define, the possibilities for ethnographic method and analysis. Each of

these needs to be dialogically linked to track an elusive culture as it sometimes

stands still, and sometimes refuses stable definition.


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2003) is such that the catalytic powers of collaboration are quite necessary to

retain Science as a viable object of interest. The lines of flight are many, and

demanding of pursuit across a field in so many thick and thin pieces. Ethno-

graphic praxis is both subject and object in this landscape, interminably caughtin collaboration.

Acknowledgments

Research on which this paper is based was part of an NIH-NHGRI study entitled

Indian and Hindu Perspectives on Genetic Variation Research, conducted in

Houston from 2004 onwards. My thanks go to our research group in HoustonRich Sharp, Janis Hutchison, and particularly Jennifer Hamiltonfor all the

explicit and implicit conversations about our chance collaboration; also to

George Marcus and Jim Faubion as ever for rich feedback and the opportunity

to articulate the methodological issues that the ELSI-HapMap project in Hous-

ton has raised. A version of this essay is soon to appear in the inaugural issue of

Collaborative Ethnographies(2008, forthcoming).

Documents

Deepa S. Reddy Caught! The Predicaments of Anthropology in Collaboration 2009